The filmmaker's Oscar-winning drama tells the harrowing story of NASA's aborted 1970 lunar mission
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NEED TO KNOW
- Ron Howard opened up about watching the crew of Artemis II’s historic mission
- The filmmaker’s Oscar-winning drama Apollo 13 tells the harrowing story of NASA’s aborted 1970 lunar mission
- In a new interview, Howard noted he painstakingly worked to make the onscreen launch look real
Legendary filmmaker Ron Howard knows what it takes to make a realistic-looking space launch, but says that watching one unfold in real life still left him in awe.
In an appearance on CBS Mornings Friday, May 1, the director joined the crew of Artemis II to discuss the recent mission.
As someone who painstakingly recreated one of NASA’s most dramatic moments for the big screen in 1995's Apollo 13, Howard admitted that watching the launch stirred a mix of professional pride and pure awe.
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Of watching Artemis II lift off, Howard said, “There was a duality because I was also sort of recalling the work that we put in to try to capture that moment. But soon that fell away, and I was just a fan and rooting for you guys… What you accomplished is extraordinary.”
Howard also revealed he followed the Artemis II mission closely, adding that he waited with “baited breath on the return.”
Apollo 13 tells the true story of astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise (played by Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton, respectively), who were forced to chart a return home following an explosion as the crew on the ground at Mission Control coordinated to get them back on Earth safely.
Ed Harris, Gary Sinise and Kathleen Quinlan also starred in the film, which was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won two.
Praised for its realism, Apollo 13 stood out for its meticulous attention to detail. Howard and his team famously used NASA’s reduced-gravity aircraft to simulate weightlessness, helping immerse audiences in the tension and uncertainty of space travel.
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Artemis II marked NASA’s first crewed journey around the Moon in more than five decades and marked a critical step in the agency’s Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the lunar surface and eventually send astronauts to Mars.
Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen launched into space on April 1 — and much was made of their "lunar flyby" days later, where the crew surpassed the record previously held by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970 for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth.
Unlike the original Apollo missions, Artemis II did not land on the Moon but instead tested vital systems needed for future exploration.
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